GamesBeat: Given how much has changed, what do you think still makes this God of War?
Barlog: At its root, God of War was always the promise of adventure. All the way back to the first game, David Jaffe used to say that a lot of games promise adventure on the back of the box, but this game delivers it. To me, this game will always be about exploring, solving puzzles, interacting with combat, developing these characters, and feeling as if you’re going on this grand adventure.
GamesBeat: What stage of the game are we seeing here? What would we know at this time?
Barlog: It’s the beginning of the game. The events that transpire here are very specific to the demo. What actually happens on that hunt is very different. It sets up the call to action and the remainder of the story. But we wanted to tell a complete story in this demo, to have a beginning and a middle and an end, so you could see the development of the kid. By the end, Kratos’s influence has changed him.
GamesBeat: Do we know, then, what happened to his mother?
Barlog: We will. That’s a big part of the story. But we don’t know yet.
GamesBeat: The graphical user interface had a set of three icons we didn’t see in the original trailer. We saw an axe, a bow, and another one that wasn’t clear. What do those represent?
Cory Barlog: Those are the stand-ins we’re using at the moment. They’re filling in the idea of having specials. This game has an element of specials. I’m playing around how that may be connected with the possibility of swapping out different styles. On the axe, you see the lines there. All this is our structure for upgrading and being able to outfit Kratos and customize his fighting style to your own specifications.
GamesBeat: Are there going to be different weapons beyond just the axe?
Barlog: Maybe? We’re going to be talking more about that later on.
GamesBeat: That axe, why would you come up with that? It almost seems like a character in itself?
Barlog: We were fundamentally changing the controls. Right away we realized that if we just put the old weapon in there, even if we changed the controls, people would always be trying to do things like they used to. Wiping the slate clean and putting something new in there gave us the opportunity to focus on the play loop we wanted to create, rather than everyone constantly going back to the feeling of the old game.
The axe has a history, a connection to their family, and a connection to other characters in the game. It’s a very important artifact in the overall story.
